Lync/Skype V and EVMonitoring and ReportingBy: Bryan Marks

Lync Monitoring and Reporting• Out of the box Lync

gives access to a substantial set of reports pertaining to Overall system Health System Adoption and Usage Quality of Modalities

IM Conferencing Voice

VoIP EV

Pre-requisites• Monitoring SQL Store is deployed

Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 Standard or Enterprise Microsoft SQL 2012 Standard or Enterprise

• SQL Reporting Services • Reports have been deployed via Lync Server

Deployment Wizard

Two Databases• Call Detail Records (LCSCDR)

• Information Lync collects about whom, what, where… and stores them in the CDR database

• Who made the call?• Who received the call?• Who initiated a conference?• What was the duration of the

call?• Who’s using the system? How

many unique users?

• Quality of Experience (QOEMetrics)• Lync collects standard

metrics for calls and stores it in the QOE database. This information pertains to the metrics such as• Packet loss• Jitter• Round trip times

Report Descriptions

Just a small taste of what’s reported on

Metrics used to determine a call quality

Lync uses a number of metrics to determine the quality of a call.Calls are either marked as good or poor based on thresholds.If one of these thresholds are crossed Lync will mark that call as a poor call.• In many cases these thresholds are caused by network

issues. Network congestion Bad network routing

But not always Hardware issues Background noise

Troubleshooting voice qualityAvg. listening MOS Calculation based on an

algorithm to classify the overall quality of a call.

1 – poor (unusable)2 – bad 3 - fair4 - good5 - excellent

Avg. Jitter Measures the average variability of packet reception times. Packets should arrive in expected intervals to have the best call quality.

< 20 ms is good>30 ms but < than 45 ms is ok>45 ms is bad

Avg. Round Trip Average time for a packet to be sent to the server and an acknowledgement to be sent back.

< 200 ms is good > 200 ms is poor > 500 ms is bad

Troubleshooting voice qualityAvg. packet loss rate When you are on a VoIP call,

the conversation is encoded in a series of packets that must all arrive in order at the other side for the conversation to continue to make sense. Packet loss occurs when packets are either don’t arrive at their destination or they are dropped because they potentially arrived too late to be played.

<=3% - Good>5%< 7% - Will impact audio>7%<10% - Threshold>10% - bad>50% - no chance

Avg. network MOS degradation

Average network MOS degradation is an integer represents the amount of the MOS value lost to network affects.

> 1 is not good> 0.5 and < 1 is threshold< 0.5 represents acceptable degradation.

Avg. concealed samples ratio

Concealing audio samples is a technique used to deal with dropped network packets.

Average concealed samples Ratio (%) is the % of packets that were concealed.

< 2% is good > 3% is not good > 7% is bad

Media Quality Summary Report• Main report

used to troubleshoot calls

• Extremely detailed

• Most of the topics that are reported on can be drilled down to get more detail.

Call Detail Report• Call Detail Report VoIP Call Demo

Enterprise Voice - LegsIn EV callsThe Call is divided into two portions.1. UC to Mediation leg

- Call looks similar to a VoIP call. SIP Address to phone number.

2. Mediation to Gateway Leg- SIP Address is

translated to Line URI.

Makes it easier to troubleshoot which leg issues are occurring.

Demo EV Report

Bonus - The Location ReportIf regions, site and subnet forms are filled out, Lync reporting has a report that is excellent for troubleshooting site to site issues.

The Location Report Cont’d

Using this report, we can easily pinpoint commonalities of where poor calls are coming from/going.

Just by looking quickly at this Location Report, can someone tell me where there might be an issue here?

Bonus Question – Why might this be an issue?

Ways to remedy network issuesLync configuration according to best practices

It can be easy to configure Lync, but if you are not following best practices it can lead to a spaghetti knot of configuration issues which can be difficult to troubleshoot after the fact.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg412892.aspx

Quality of Service (QOS) Process of prioritizing packets by tagging them and instructing

your routing devices to prioritize them. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg405409.aspx

Call Admission Control (CAC) Call admission control (CAC) determines, based on available

network bandwidth, whether to allow real-time communications sessions such as voice or video calls to be established.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg398529.aspx

Wrap Up• Lync Monitoring and Reporting is an extremely powerful set

of reports designed to help you track and troubleshoot your Lync system.

• Useful for Trending overall adoption of Lync Troubleshooting system or configuration issues Analyzing and troubleshooting call quality issues for both VoIP and Enterprise Voice.

• A word of advice, configure everything in Lync to make these reports as useful as possible especially in multi-site setups or where there’s a VPN and people working from home. (Network Configuration > Region, Site and Subnet.

ReferencesBlog written by Curtis Johnstone on Lync Audio Quality Metrics

http://blog.insidelync.com/2012/06/a-primer-on-lync-audio-quality-metrics/

White Paper written by Bryan Marks

http://1drv.ms/1IgJinD